A Middle Eastern Perspective | Jasmin Faulk
Jasmin Faulk grew up as a girl in Saudi Arabia, where gender segregation was not ideology but daily law. In this conversation with Stella O'Malley, Mia Hughes and Dr Bret Alderman, she draws a striking line between the restrictions she lived under there and the ideological pressures she encountered after moving to the United States — arguing that censorship and conformity can emerge from opposite ends of the political spectrum.
Jasmin Faulk arrives at this conversation with a perspective that is genuinely rare in the gender debate. Born in Saudi Arabia and raised under a legal and social system built entirely around the segregation of the sexes, she later emigrated to the United States and eventually wrote about her experiences in her memoir The Last Sand Storm. Her background gives Stella O'Malley, Mia Hughes and Dr Bret Alderman a conversation partner whose understanding of what it means to regulate women's bodies and behaviour is not theoretical. It is remembered. Faulk walks the hosts through the specific textures of growing up female in Saudi Arabia: the precise moment at which girls are required to cover themselves in public, the legal architecture that defined the outer limits of a woman's life, and the pervasive sense of being watched. That experience of surveillance — the way it disciplines behaviour and suppresses dissent before it can even form — becomes a thread she returns to throughout the episode, and one the hosts are clearly alert to. What makes the episode distinctive is the analytical move Faulk makes when she turns to her life in the United States. She does not simply contrast her two worlds as opposites. Instead, she identifies what she sees as a structural similarity in how ideological conformity gets enforced: the all-or-nothing reactions that punish deviation, the culture of cancellation that she argues mirrors, in different dress, the fundamentalism she left behind. She describes this as a horseshoe dynamic — the idea that extreme positions at opposite ends of a spectrum can curve back toward each other. It is the kind of framing that the Beyond Gender conversation is well placed to examine. At the core of Faulk's argument is a point the podcast has returned to across many episodes: that biological sex is not a construct to be dissolved but a material reality with direct consequences for women's safety and health. Coming from someone who experienced a legal system that organised itself entirely around that reality — however repressively — the argument arrives with particular weight. Stella and Mia draw her out on what it means to have your sex treated as destiny, and where the line falls between protection and control. The episode also moves into American academia, with Faulk using the flashpoint at Evergreen State College as an example of the illiberal tendencies she had been watching develop. It is characteristic of Beyond Gender at its best: testimony that opens into structural analysis, hosts who push on assumptions rather than simply affirming them, and a guest who has earned her positions through experience rather than inherited them from a tribe.
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